In the wake of the 2015 Paris Agreement, there has been a renewed emphasis on moving away from fossil fuel power to renewable energy. We continue to make significant progress – 2015 marked a record $329 billion in global investments towards clean energy – however, much remains to be done. One month after the talks, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told business leaders that in order to put the historic agreement into practice, they needed to act decisively to accelerate the transition away from the fossil fuel economy.
The secretary general made a bold statement: “I challenge investors to double – at a minimum – their clean energy investments by 2020.” The current $329 billion in green energy investments is far from the “clean trillion” needed per year, Ban asserted. This new statement follows the UN’s recent efforts to reach out to the business community in order to seek financial support to slow rising global temperatures.
The sense of urgency is augmented by the recent momentous plunge in oil prices: Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, told attendants of the World Economic Forum in Davos that energy efficiency had been driven largely by an interest in saving money, which is disappearing as fossil fuels become cheaper. The message, clearly, was that businessmen should be picking up this slack. However, France’s environment minister Ségolène Royal offered a contrasting view: she argued that lower oil prices have made the search for oil less attractive, making today the right time to remove subsidies for fossil fuel and introduce a price on carbon dioxide pollution. Ban Ki-moon called for similar actions. While taxes on carbon remain unpopular in the US, President Obama last week floated the idea of an oil fee of $10 a barrel that would add 25 cents per gallon to gasoline and support the development of clean energy and infrastructure.
The UN Secretary General made his “clean trillion” speech at a summit organized jointly by Ceres, a non-profit organization advocating for sustainability leadership, and the United Nations Foundation. The investors present at the summit represented over $20 trillion in wealth. This combination of public, private and NGOs will be increasingly important in helping the world achieve a target of limiting global warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as outlined in the Paris Agreement.
This post was originally published on EdSappin.com